Peter Nkutsoeu Raboroko

Peter Nkutsoeu Raboroko was born in 1917 in the Orange Free State where his father was employed as a farm laborer.  He grew up in the slums of Sophiatown in Johannesburg. He made his way through the educational channels then open to Africans, going from St. Peter's Secondary School through Fort Hare in the 1930s. He later began medical studies but did not finish them. In 1935 he became president of the Transvaal African Students' Association and also joined the African National Congress (ANC). He was in the group that launched the Youth League in 1944, and he helped both to draw up the league's constitution and to publish its journal, African Lodestar. During this period he taught in Johannesburg, and between 1950 and 1952 he was the vice-president of the Transvaal African Teachers' Association. Arrested in the Defiance Campaign, he served a short sentence in late 1952. Within the ANC, Raboroko identified himself with the Africanist faction and wrote occasional pieces for the Africanist. He held the post of secretary for education in the PAC after its founding in 1959 and was a member of its national working committee. Known as a party theoretician, he was the author of the Pan African Congress (PAC) Manifesto. After the Sharpeville massacre, he became a PAC representative in Accra. He was later among a group of PAC leaders deported from Zambia and has since lived in Kenya, where he is employed as a teacher.